Beatriz’s routine did not involve rising early. She would wake with the certainty that everything was underway: the bread and coffee already set on the table, the gardens being watered, and the clean clothes being ironed. She liked to start her days listening to her husband doing his ablutions, dreaming and from a distance, and then wake herself, still wrapped in the sheets, by saying a Rosary in peace.
But that day, in the Morales Cortés house, there were no ablutions, no Rosary, and no peace.
2
Echoes of Honey
I was born within that pile of masonry stone, plaster, and paint a long time ago. It doesn’t matter how long; all that matters is that the first thing I made contact with outside of my mama’s belly was the clean sheets of her bed, because I was lucky enough to be born on a Tuesday night and not a Monday. Since time immemorial, the women of her family had changed the sheets on Tuesdays, like decent people did. That Tuesday, the sheets smelled of lavender and of the sun. Can I remember it? No, but I imagine it. In all the years I spent living with my mama, I never saw her change her routine, her habits, the way she did things as God intended: on Tuesdays, the beds were made with linen that had been washed the day before with bleach, then dried in the sun, and finally ironed.
Every Tuesday of her life, with just one, painful exception that was still to come.
It could’ve happened the day I was born, but it didn’t. Mine was a Tuesday like any other, so I know what those sheets smelled like that night, and I know how they felt on the skin.
Although I don’t remember it, on the day I was born the house already smelled how it would smell forevermore. Its porous stones had absorbed the good aromas of three generations of hardworking men and three of women who were sticklers for cleanliness with their oils and soaps; the walls were impregnated with the family recipes and the clothes boiling in white soap. The scents of my grandmother’s pecan sweets; of her preserves and jams; of the thyme and epazote that grew in pots in the garden; and more recently of the oranges, blossoms, and honey—they always floated in the air.
As part of its essence, the house also preserved the laughter and games of its children, the scolding and slamming of doors, past and present. The loose tile my grandfather and his twenty-two siblings trod with their bare feet and my father trod in his childhood was the same one I trod as a boy. That tile was a betrayer of mischief, for with its inevitable clunk, the mother of the time would be alerted to whatever plan her offspring had hatched. The house beams creaked for no apparent reason, the doors squeaked, the shutters banged rhythmically against the wall even when there was no wind. Outside, the bees buzzed and the cicadas surrounded us with their mad, incessant song every summer evening, just before nightfall, while I was immersed in my final adventures of the day. As the sun went down, one began to sing and the rest followed, until they all decided at once to fall silent, frightened by the impending darkness, I suspect.
It was a living house, the one that saw me born. If it sometimes gave off the scent of orange blossom in winter or some unattributable giggles were heard in the middle of the night, nobody was scared: they were part of the house’s personality, of its essence. There are no ghosts in this house, my father would say to me. What you hear are the echoes it has kept to remind us of all those who’ve been here. I understood. I imagined my grandfather’s twenty-two siblings and the noise they must have made, and it seemed logical that, years later, remnants of their laughter could still be heard reverberating here or there.
And in much the same way, I suppose my years in that house left some echoes of me there—Shush, boy, you’re like a cicada, Mother would say to me—and the house left its own echoes in me. I carry them inside me still. I’m certain I carry my mama and papa in my cells, but also the lavender, the orange blossoms, my mother’s sheets, my grandmother’s calculated footsteps, the toasted pecans, the clunk of the treacherous tile, the sugar caramelizing, the cajeta, the mad cicadas, the smells of old wood, and the polished clay floors. I’m also made of oranges—green, sweet, or rotten; of orange-blossom honey and royal jelly. I’m made of everything that touched my senses during that time and entered the part of my brain where I keep my memories.
If I could get there of my own accord to see the house and feel it again, I would.
But I’m old. The children I have left—and now, even my grandchildren—make my decisions for me. It has been years since they allowed me to drive a car or write a check. They speak to me as if I didn’t hear them or couldn’t understand them. The thing is, I’ll admit: I hear, but I don’t listen. It must be that I don’t want to. Granted, my eyes don’t work as well as they did, my hands shake, my legs tire, and my patience runs out when my grandchildren and great-grandchildren visit me, but while I’m old, I’m not incompetent. I know the times I live in and the outrageous price of things; I don’t like it, but I’m not unaware of it.
I know exactly how much this journey will cost me.
I may be old, but I don’t talk to myself or see things that aren’t there. Not yet. I know a memory from reality, even if I grow more attached to my memories than to reality with each day. In the privacy of my mind I go over who said what, who married whom, what happened before, and what happened after. I relive the sweet sensation of being hidden among the high branches of a pecan tree, reaching out, plucking a pecan, and opening it with the best nutcracker I’ve ever had: my own teeth. I hear, I smell, and I feel things that are as much a part of me today as they were yesterday, and which spring up inside me. Someone can tear open an orange nearby, and the aroma transports me to my mama’s kitchen or my papa’s orchard. The mass-produced bottles of cajeta remind me of the tireless hands of my grandmother, who would spend hours stirring milk and sugar over the fire so it would caramelize without burning.
The sounds of the cicadas and bees, now rarely heard in the city, force me to travel to my childhood, though I can no longer run. I still search with my nose for a trace of lavender, and find it, even when it’s not real. When I close my eyes at night, I hear the clunk of the floor tile, the creak of beams, and the shutters banging, even though, in my townhouse, there are no loose tiles or beams or shutters. I feel like I’m at home, the one I left as a child. The one I left too soon. I feel like it’s with me, and I like it.
3
The Empty Rocking Chair
Beatriz Cortés de Morales would remember that morning in October 1910 for the rest of her life.
They had knocked on her door insistently, and thinking they had come to tell her one of the sugarcane fields was on fire, she left the warmth of her bed to open up. It was Pola, crying: they couldn’t find Nana Reja anywhere. Wasn’t she in her bed? No. She wasn’t in her rocking chair? No. Where else could the little old lady be?
Dead, lying out there in the bushes, probably.
Beatriz had known Nana Reja her whole life because, having been neighbors for generations, the Morales and Cortés families often visited one another’s homes. Though she’d always known her future husband, she fell in love with him when she was sixteen, when Francisco Morales returned from his civil engineering studies at the University of Notre Dame and asked her to dance with him to a romantic song during the Holy Saturday festivities.